Thrive is a game about the universe - we want to let you play however you want, make whatever you want, and live however you like. Thrive will be a free, open-source game created by an online community of dedicated volunteers. Our team seeks to accomplish two major goals: create engaging, compelling gameplay that respects our players' intelligence, and remain as accurate as possible in our depiction of known scientific theory.

In order to better express the desired visual style of the microbe stage, our artist/composer Oliveriver created a short animation demonstrating what the cell stage may look like, using components from many of our artists. The short animation is meant to provide insight into our goals for the upcoming microbe stage.

Keep your eyes peeled for more news, and of course If you have questions/suggestions feel free to post them here or on our reddit.

Personally, I'd be much more impressed by a screenshot of just a few lines of actual code that's been written for the game, than this - and all the other 'animations' they've been releasing over the past months.

All right then, join the team (and don't nag us if we let you on the team) then go to the programming, look at our codebase and help us with it instead of complaining about animations, we have a LOT of code actually sadly we haven't released anything about the actual game-play yet, but we do in fact have a huge codebase and we are working on the actual microbe stage right now..

Hey, I'm just an asshat, alright, I don't even know how to code what I complain about - I can't be a part of the solution so I should just shut my mouth, I dunno what I was on when I made those comments. Apologies.

As you might expect, it's not very fun to hear that two months worth of painstaking work is a joke.

This animation was made to help progress the game further - it gives programmers somewhere to aim for, shows artists and musicians what works well and what doesn't, and it even flagged up several balance issues. This animation has already moved the game's development further, and frankly any amount of progress is good progress.

Thank you for your insightful, constructive criticism. I'm sure it will be of more use to development than this animation.

I suppose I should elaborate. A theory states that one method by which cells became complex and attained new organelles was by consuming incompatible bacteria, or being invaded by them. Over time a symbiotic relationship emerged which later became integral. It just seems more in-depth than cells picking and choosing random DNA they 'collect'.

I think a mechanic where one type of NPC bacteria with a particular trait made a habit of invading player made cells, and then the cells had to adapt to not be impacted negatively and incorporate the benefits of the new organelle would be interesting.

Why don't you guys do a kickstarter, get some more people involved, and really push to pick up the pace on developement? I feel that the goals of it being free or crowd sourced should be secondary to making the best game you can, in a timely manner.

really nice ... gives me and good idea of how you want the game to play and i have to say love it i really cant wait to pick up this game/simulation of life and go wild :)

thank you for the update

and for those asking for code lol its a rare thing for any dev to release code and most devs just go with a story board approach to explain how something will happen and look so wow to have an animation awesome

I am unsure the best way to reach you, But i have come up with an idea regarding creature stage (or whatever your going to name it) movement.
If you make the general forward, back and side movements with WASD, and the head movement ALL mouse controlled, By simply moving the mouse around, You move the creatures head around, If your creature has tusks or sharp horns etc you can move the mouse quickly and "thrashy" which will enable the creature to hit or slice the opposing creature. The left mouse button will control biting by just clicking the left mouse button your creature will bite once, But if you hold the button down the creature will bite rapidly. The right mouse button could control its voice, Pressing the button will create a small roar, tweet etc. But if yo hold it down it will make a very long roar, Call etc.

These are just some of my ideas. I hope you will take them into consideration.